Do we live in the age of emotion politics? the effects of anger, disgust, hope, and nostalgia communication on political support and polarisation

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Abstract

Surprising political victories in the last decade, such as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign win, fuelled the popular lay theory that we are living in an age of “post-truth” politics, where facts do not matter anymore. Across ten studies, this thesis systematically tested how the addition of anger, disgust, hope, and nostalgia to political messages affected political support for the communicator and (perceived) political polarisation in society. Across these studies, we found that emotion communication did not seem to positively affect political support or polarisation, and sometimes even backfired. We did find that the communication of emotion sets into motion the psychological processes of emotion contagion (i.e., feeling the same emotion as the one communicated) and goal inference (i.e., using the emotion to infer the intentions of the communicator), with the cognitive inference reactions being more common. We also found that people seemed to respond mostly to general characteristics of the communicated emotion (future- or past-oriented, positive or negative), with anger and disgust communication leading to very similar (backfiring) effects, and nostalgia communication leading to more unique effects, communicating a willingness to return to the systems and values of old. Lastly, we found that the reactions were generally similar across audiences with different political backgrounds, but that depending on the national context or discussed topic, the effectiveness and reactions of emotion communication varied. Altogether, these results show that the reality of emotion communication in political messages is more complex than laid out in the lay theory of post-truth politics.
Original languageEnglish
QualificationDoctor of Philosophy
Awarding Institution
  • University of Groningen
Supervisors/Advisors
  • van Zomeren, Martijn, Supervisor
  • Epstude, Kai, Co-supervisor
Award date9-Jun-2022
Place of Publication[Groningen]
Publisher
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

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